ronh1066 wrote: I thought having 12 capacitor banks ment that one was connected to each cathode,

違います

(“chigaimasu” aka “it’s different” or “not so” in Japanese).

How exactly is the power from the capacitors brought to the cathode?

Glad you asked!

The short answer is the twelve capacitors discharge onto the plates which deliver the surge to the electrodes. I’ll get a picture of the plates up soon.

I’m working on a detailed schematic/animation/slide show to put all the pieces together to show the electricity delivery system into the core electrodes. This system is also known the “driver” and is comprised of the power supply, the trigger system, the capacitors, switches and plates. All the pieces of the driver need to be precisely coordinated to dump that charge simultaneously into the electrodes via the plates.

This piece I’m working on will also explain what happens during a “prefire” and where the breakdowns occurred with the trigger system and the switches (resolved) and are now occurring with the spark plugs. It’ll be cool because you’ll see the variables and get a better sense of design possibilities.

The other piece we need is something to show a graph of the readout of a pinch on the oscilloscope – and what that corresponds to in terms of electrical flow across the electrodes.

The animations we have up so far just show what happens when the ideal pulse of electricity has been delivered into the electrodes. So we see that lovely sheath.

We are going to do some cross-section diagrams that will help. The capacitors are charged positive, so they actually connect to the anode, the central electrode, while the cathode rods are at ground. When the switchs fire, electrons flow from the ground through the cathode plate and then through the plasma near the insulator to get to the anode, and through that to the capacitors. Current, which is conventionally defined as always flowing from plus to minus, flows in the opposite direction to the electrons (just to confuse you–when current was defined, they did not know about electrons.) The current sheath moves outwards away from the insulator and arrives at the cathode rods some 100s of ns into the shot. Then events continue as in the animation.

Per present convention, a positive “test charge” moves toward the more negatively charged (electron surplus) side of a circuit, electrical field or voltage differential. Therefore negative charges move in the opposite direction. A current thus can actually have electrons moving in one direction and positive ions, protons, etc moving in the opposite direction simultaneously.

In a conventional “wire” the metallic ions are fairly tightly bound into the metallic “crystal” lattice, so they are hardly free to move, while the electrons are highly mobile and can move (at drift current speed, not the speed of light) along the wire. In a conducting plasma, both species are unbound and free to move, and do, in accordance with Maxwell’s and Lorentz’s laws.

Jim